The extreme-right and enfranchisement of immigrants: Main issues in the public “debate” on integration in Belgium

In Belgium, the issue of (local) enfranchisement of foreign residents has without any doubt become the most salient topic of public debate on integration of immigrants and their descendants. Although debate about the issue dates back to the early 1970s, at the start of the 21st century it is still one of the hottest topics in Belgian politics. A second salient topic concerns the strategy against the Flemish extreme-right wing party the Vlaams Blok, or the debate about the so-called ‘cordon sanitaire’ since the 1990s. This contribution wants to discuss the public debate on voting rights for non-Belgians and the strategy against the Vlaams Blok as the most contentious issues in the wider debate about (the future of) immigrant incorporation in Belgian society. Thus, we hope to be able to clarify the (absence of) debate on integration and multiculturalism in Belgium.     

Metropolitan migration in the past: Labour markets, commerce, and cultural interaction in Europe, 1600–1914

This article challenges the “imaginary ethnography” of European urban population as monocultural and non-migrating. Pre-1800 European migrations are discussed first, next changing patterns in the 19th century are summarized. In the third section immigration to industrializing cities at the height of nationalism is exemplified by Czech migration to Vienna, Polish migration to the cities of the Ruhr District, and the multicultural and immigrant character of Budapest and of Paris. Immigrant insertion, conflict, migrants, and economic niches, as well as the reaction of host societies and community formation are discussed. In conclusion, older theories of disorganization are contrasted with recent concepts of acculturation and transcultural lives.     

On the predictive validity of indirect attitude measures: Prediction of consumer choice behavior on the basis of affective priming in the picture-picture naming task

Recent studies have revealed that robust and replicable affective priming of naming responses can be obtained when pictures are used as primes and targets. The aim of the present research was to examine the predictive validity of affective priming effects that are obtained with the picture-picture naming task. In two studies that were modeled after [Karpinski, A., & Hilton, J. L. (2001). Attitudes and the Implicit Association Test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 774-778], we observed that individual difference scores that are obtained with the naming task exhibit good predictive validity. Both practical and theoretical implications of this finding are discussed.     

The repeated confrontation with videotapes of spiders in multiple contexts attenuates renewal of fear in spider-anxious students

In a treatment-analogue experiment, extinction of fear of spiders was investigated in a group of spider-anxious students. Two groups were created: in the single extinction group the extinction trials consisted of repeated presentations of a videotaped spider in one specific location of a house, whereas in the multiple extinction group the trials consisted of videotapes of the same spider in three different locations of a house. Also a control group was included that was exposed to videotapes of the location but without the spider. As reflected in skin conductance responses and self-report data, fear of spiders was significantly reduced in the two extinction groups compared to the control group. Moreover, when the extinction groups were confronted with the videotape of the spider in a new location, the single extinction group did not show generalisation of extinction, whereas the multiple extinction group did. These results corroborate the existing evidence for context dependence of extinction of fear and provide new evidence that the use of multiple contexts during extinction might improve the generalisability of extinction in humans. Implications for exposure therapy are discussed.     

Extended mathematical cognition: external representations with non-derived content

Synthese - Vehicle externalism maintains that the vehicles of our mental representations can be located outside of the head, that is, they need not be instantiated by neurons located inside the...     

The challenge of measuring immigrant origin and immigration-related ethnicity in Europe

Different European nation-states use the most diverse statistical constructions of foreign origin or ethnic minority populations. Several countries traditionally even shun from producing such data. This makes international comparison a very difficult endeavour. Anyone wanting to perform comparative research on immigrants or (immigrant origin) ethnic minorities in Europe is unavoidably confronted with the most diverse types of national statistical data and has to opt for ad hoc solutions. Attempts at international comparison can thus be very tricky due to data characteristics. It is important that researchers are aware of these problems and do not simply accept data (especially in comparisons) at face value. In this article we embark on a comparative explorative study of the way in which immigrant background and immigration related ethnicity is taken stock of by national statistical institutes in a set of European nation-states.     

Affective priming of nonaffective semantic categorization responses

Recent studies have shown that robust affective priming effects can be obtained when participants are required to categorize the targets on the basis of their valence, but not when participants are asked to categorize the targets on the basis of nonaffective features. On the basis of this pattern of results, it has been argued that affective priming is due to processes that operate at a response selection stage rather than to processes that operate at an encoding stage. We demonstrate (a) that affective priming of nonaffective semantic categorization responses can be obtained when participants assign attention to the affective stimulus dimension, and (b) that affective priming in the standard evaluative categorization task is strongly reduced when participants assign attention to nonaffective stimulus features. On the basis of these findings, we argue (a) that processes operating at an encoding stage do contribute to the affective priming effect, and (b) that automatic affective stimulus processing is reduced when participants selectively attend to nonaffective stimulus features.     

Differential acquisition, extinction, and reinstatement of conditioned suppression in mice

In animals, the reappearance of conditioned fear responses after extinction has been primarily investigated using single-cue conditioning paradigms. However, a differential paradigm can overcome several of the disadvantages associated with a single-cue procedure. In the present study, the reinstatement phenomenon was assessed in mice using a differential conditioned suppression paradigm. In a first phase, one conditioned stimulus (CS + ) was consistently paired with an unconditioned stimulus (US; footshock) while another CS (CS-) was not, resulting in selective suppression of previously trained instrumental behaviour during the CS + . After the extinction phase, half of the animals (reinstatement group) were presented with unsignalled USs, while the other half were not (control group). A differential return of conditioned responding was observed in the reinstatement group, but not in the control group. The implications of these findings for future conditioning research are discussed.     

About the impact of automaticity in the minimal group paradigm: evidence from affective priming tasks

Two experiments examined whether novel, minimal ingroups are automatically associated with positive affect while outgroups do not elicit such positive evaluative default. Participants were assigned to social categories in a typical minimal group setting and subsequently administered a masked priming task, i.e. prime words were not consciously recognized. Following either the presentation of a priori positive or negative words or the presentation of the group labels, participants classified adjectives with regard to their valence (positive/negative). In Experiment 1, a standard affective priming paradigm was realized with response latencies as dependent measures; in Experiment 2, a response window technique was used, with errors as crucial measure. In both studies, significant affective congruency effects emerged similarly for standard primes and category labels, indicating ingroup bias on an implicit level. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.